SINGAPORE: A Filipino national who cheated restaurants into delivering more than S$9,000 worth of food was sentenced to one year and eleven months in jail on Thursday (Nov 13).
Thirty-three-year-old Maria Monalyn Bagaporo Santos-Tumalip pleaded guilty to four charges, including cheating and theft, earlier this week.
For over two years, Bagaporo would transfer money to her own account. She would then take a screenshot of the transaction and edit it to show fake proof of payment to different food and beverage establishments.
Her offences began in May 2022, when she started having food delivered from Home of Seafood, a restaurant at Joo Chiat Place. For these orders, she chose the option of paying via PayNow. After taking a screenshot of her transaction, she used an app to change the name of the recipient to Home of Seafood. In other instances, she would also doctor the details of the account from which the payment came, in order to deceive the eatery into thinking that the payment had come from different accounts.
After doctoring the screenshots, she would send them via WhatsApp to the restaurant she had ordered from, which facilitated the delivery.
From May 2022 to August 2023, on more than 35 occasions, she was able to order food from Home of Seafood worth around S$3,892 without paying a cent, doing so because she wished to impress her friends.
Prior to Sept 23, the restaurant manager merely glanced at the screenshots from Bagaporo to make sure the details tallied with the orders she had made, but did not check whether or not the restaurant’s account had received the payments.
When the manager checked the bank account statements and saw anomalies, she filed a report with the police over the cheating incidents.
Bagaporo, however, continued with her deceptive ways and, from June 2024 to May 2025, cheated a Serangoon Gardens Italian restaurant, Baci Baci, out of food orders worth a total of S$6,168. The restaurant filed a police report against her on May 25, 2025.
According to a report in CNA, Bagaporo not only did this with another restaurant, but she also stole S$739 worth of groceries from a Giant grocery store at Bedok, as well as doctored a voucher for a treatment at a hair salon worth S$381.50.
Three additional charges were taken into consideration for her sentencing. A person found guilty of cheating could be sentenced to jail for up to 10 years, fined, or both. Meanwhile, for theft, she could have been sent to jail for up to seven years, fined, or both. /TISG
